Grandpa Apple appears in Zhongpu, Chiayi, Taiwan, China — on-the-spot report

Text and photography / Yu Kuo-hsin
Lead image / www.cheziguchi.com/kimura-4.htm

Having crossed over a long decade of poverty and all sorts of setbacks, Mr. Kimura's willpower to "never give up" and his spirit of "natural farming," which breaks with conventional agricultural attempts, moved all of Japan. When his story was discovered and broadcast in 2006 on the NHK program "Professional - The Expert's Style," it has since been rerun more than 100 times at viewers' request.

The Kimura method has become a trend, and this year the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations even listed Mr. Akinori Kimura's natural farming cultivation method as an important agricultural practice, abbreviated as the A.K. method; from what seems like a grassroots, back-to-basics farming method, a set of methods that seems to be learned by doing, one can in fact see in the process Grandpa Kimura's agricultural foresight and his thinking on reviving agriculture.

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